Electronic mail (email) communications are an integral part of any business, and widely used outside of business as well. Although several new technologies currently compete, as the most ubiquitous tool in business communications, email remains one of the single most used communications tools for both the business and the personal user. Widespread availability, ease of use, and functionality are key components which hold email in front of developing communications methods; however, as new technologies compete for the top spot, email applications must continue to build upon the strong foundation currently in place to maintain their edge as the tool of choice. By any current standard, email applications would have to be rated as mature technology; however, if improvements in email applications cease to move forward, and other tools continue to improve, loss of market share will undoubtedly result. One key feature missing in legacy email tools is efficient management of locally sourced electronic mail attachments.
Often, electronic mail messages have documents attached to the message. During the process of creating the electronic message, the user has the option to attach a document to the created message. When the user attaches a document to the message, this attachment process often creates another copy of the attached document. With some electronic mail systems, a copy of each transmitted message is also saved on a mail server. The document attached the message is also saved with these message. In addition, some users choose to copy themselves on messages that they transmit. In theses cases, the attached documents are also copied and stored with the message. As a result, in many cases, the transmission of attachment documents with electronic mail messages creates multiple copies of the same document. These multiple copies occupy substantial memory or storage space in a system.
Storage space and processing cycles carry extensive cost to owning organizations, and as such, any optimization in this area is critical to a corporate cost structure. Legacy electronic mail systems do a poor job of managing replicate data in the form of locally sourced attachments, and as such, storage space is wasted, and system resources are stressed beyond functional need. When the creator of an electronic message locally sources an attachment document, there is no need for the electronic mail system to store additional copies of the attached document. Conventional legacy electronic mail systems, by default, will save between three (3) to six (6) copies of the same locally sourced attachment document through poor replication management processes.
Therefore, there remains a need for a method and system that can better manage the creation and storage of multiple copies of documents that are attached to electronic mail messages such that multiple unnecessary copies of these documents are not created and storage space is more efficiently used as a result of the reduction and elimination of the unnecessary attachment documents.